Anna keenly enjoyed the worst of health.
She was an anæmic-looking girl with a pasty complexion, and hair several shades too light to correspond comfortably with it.
Ill-health was the only subject in life in which she took a genuine interest.
Miss Bibby supposed Anna quite a reader, so often did she find her deep in a paper, and so the girl was—of medical advertisements. The marvellous recoveries of persons like Mrs. Joseph Huggins, of Arabella Street, [p115] Chippendale, who had been given up by six leading doctors after suffering from a blood-curdling list of ailments for seventeen years, and had been cured after taking one bottle, were a source of unfailing interest to Anna.
And never did an advertisement offer free a sample bottle of any drug, no matter for what purpose, but Anna sent instantly and claimed it.
It needed nothing but the announcement on Max’s malt bottle of its tissue-building qualities, and its power of restoring the waste of nature in the human frame, for the girl at once privately to take a course of the same treatment and, as the chemist’s bill might have testified, from the same bottle.
Similarly with Lynn’s tonic; the accompanying pamphlet said something about its invigorating powers and the restoration of red corpuscles to the blood, so Anna at once prescribed it for herself also—out of Lynn’s bottle.
And Miss Bibby’s Health Foods that that lady paid for out of her slender purse—Anna determined that it was these things that gave the temporary head of the house that curiously delicate clear skin of hers; so being by no means satisfied with her own complexion, she consistently assisted herself to a small quantity of each, without, it need hardly be stated, foregoing any of her [p116] hearty meals at the kitchen table with Blake the gardener.
Miss Bibby had certainly been vaguely surprised at first at the rapid lowering both of the children’s medicines and her own tins, but never dreaming of suspecting so unusual a cause, soon grew entirely accustomed to it, and imagined it was the normal consumption.
Her own constitution thus fortified, this morning Anna called loudly through the window for Max and Lynn to come in this instant and take their “medsuns.”